Lessons for Gillard

Associate editor of The Age

The PM urgently needs to stop sounding robotic and rehearsed, as her performance during this week's floods shows.

MY MOTHER was born and raised in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales and knew a bit about floods. The best known flood in the Hunter was in 1955 in Maitland, later portrayed to dramatic effect in Phillip Noyce's film Newsfront. But there had been big floods there earlier. One of them swept through her house when she was a young woman and washed away most of her personal effects - photos, old schoolbooks, letters, jewellery.

Many years later, having married and moved to Victoria, she was still sad about that loss, and it didn't take much for her to recall the fear she had felt as the waters rose and she was rescued by soldiers in a dinghy. In the kitchen of our Melbourne home, where she spent most of the day, she listened to an old, brown Bakelite valve radio about the size of a small shoebox.

Once, when I was about 10, I noticed that the vents covering the radio's speaker were caked with a thin, hard film of dirt, and I offered to clean them for her. She said she knew the dirt was there and never wanted it cleaned away because it was dried mud from the floods; somehow the radio had not been damaged.

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''The radio and I made it through, and I touch that mud every day,'' she said. My mother told me that she valued her experience with the flood because it had taught her that fear can be conquered. ''You can't conquer all of your fears but you can conquer some of them,'' she said.

Will the Queensland floods provide Julia Gillard with a valuable life lesson?

Almost seven months in, Gillard still does not look comfortable as the nation's political leader, and that discomfort was on display at different times this week. Some of the criticism of Gillard in the past few days has been unwarranted and unfair, but something is still not right with the way she presents herself. In news conferences and interviews she has looked and sounded robotic and rehearsed. Whether she is coached or coaches herself to punch out key words and phrases only Gillard and her staff can say, but all too often this week it looked that way.

It is self-administered poison for Gillard to continue to give that impression, because she is the one who, during last year's election campaign, constructed the framework of ''real Julia'' and ''fake Julia'' while trying to reignite Labor's faltering election effort. When she looks stage-managed, it hurts her at a time when Labor can't afford to shed any more support.

This rigorous self-editing on the part of the Prime Minister can be explained at least in part by two things: her status as the first female prime minister and the way in which she came to the Labor Party leadership. Like Barack Obama, who knew that the moment he lost his temper in public he would be dismissed as just another angry black man, Gillard has calculated that she must always appear to be in control of herself, lest she be cast as a harridan. This observes a double standard, of course, but the world is full of them. Look at the media criticism not just this week but any week about her choice of clothes. Male politicians simply aren't scrutinised that way.

The other factor driving Gillard's apparent preoccupation with demonstrating self-control is the messy and relatively unconventional method by which she became Prime Minister, which reflected Labor's internal chaos and, for a substantial number of voters, undermined public trust in the government. In order to restore that trust, Gillard clearly has committed herself to setting a tone for her government in which proper process and low temperatures, and not high emotions, predominate.

The problem is that an extraordinary event requires an extraordinary response, not a business-as-usual delivery. Unfortunately for Gillard, in the public and media eye she suffered in comparison with Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, whose public manner this week was unadorned and spontaneous. The juxtaposition was not altogether fair. The reality is that under our system of government a premier is charged with running an emergency effort. Gillard was destined to ride along in the sidecar as Bligh did her job. The Prime Minister was caught; she had to be there, knowing she would be playing second fiddle to a state premier. And not just once but day after day, with rolling television coverage.

All the same, Gillard needs to reset her formal style of presentation, and to stop second-guessing herself. Sure, she is charming and down-to-earth when she meets the public - she wins people over pretty much every time - but most Australians will never meet her, they will see her on TV. Getting that stuff right is an urgent priority because the budgetary impact of the floods will be massive. Bligh is right to liken the recovery to a postwar recovery effort.

The members of the Canberra press gallery who pressed Gillard on the plan to get back to surplus in 2013 at her Tuesday news conference got a bollocking on talkback radio, but the question had to be asked: how will Australians pay to repair Queensland? This issue will dominate Australian politics for the next two years.

Gillard was asked if she should set aside the commitment to return to surplus by the next election. Her answer is worth recording here: ''Well, we are committed to long-term funding for the rebuilding of Queensland and in the days ahead, as floodwaters ultimately subside, the rebuilding task will become clearer. And what we need to do and finance to enable Queensland to overcome the damage of these floodwaters will become clearer. We will do that, and bring the budget to surplus in 2012-13, and yes that will entail some tough choices.''

Tough choices? That's putting it mildly. What this means is that if the recovery cost to the Commonwealth is, say, $12 billion, that amount will have to be cut out of government spending programs over the next two years. It's a challenge for the government that could rival the global financial crisis. Voters get it: Gillard is good at self-discipline. She still has to demonstrate that she is good at being Prime Minister.